Mosquitoes and other biting and stinging insects have long been the bane of hunters and outdoorsmen. Various chemicals, often in the form of sprays and smoke, and electrical devices have been developed to protect hunters, but with limited success and applicability in the woods. Various designs of protective garments are available which recognize the need for clothing that substantially reduces the irritation to outdoorsmen caused by insect bites and stings.
U.S.S.R. Pat. No. 267,858 discloses a suit designed for protection against blood sucking insects. The suit includes a shirt of two-piece construction with an inner shirt layer of more open netting being separate from an outer shirt layer and where the collective layers have a combined thickness of about 3.8 mm (1/4 inch). Further, exemplary garments are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,028,947 to Palm, U.S Pat. No. 2,074,390 to Green, U.S. Pat. No. 3,191,185 to Martin and U.S. Pat. No. 3,783,451 to Malin. This group of patents discloses garments which utilize various devices such as buttons, springs, spacers made of rope, plastic or cloth tufts, inflatable tubes, plastic inserts and the like to space the garment away from the body of the wearer so as to prevent an insect or snake from biting or stinging the wearer through the garment. However, use of such devices is most often limited to only certain areas of the garment inasmuch as such spacing means cannot be located at areas of the garment where the wearer would cause the spacing means to bear directly on their skin such as in the seat of a pair of trousers when in a sitting position or the chest area of a shirt when in a prone position on the ground. Moreover, these prior art devices are expensive and difficult to manufacture on a broad scale, and as far as applicant knows have not been commercialized to any extent.
An object of this invention is to provide a comfortable and economically constructed multilayered fabric protective garment for hunters and outdoorsmen comprising interconnected inner and outer fabric layers and which provides protection against mosquitoes and other types of insects by the inner layer of fabric serving as a spacer layer to space the skin of the wearer of the garment at such a distance from the outer surface of the garment that mosquitoes cannot span the same so as to bite the wearer thereof.
An additional object is to provide a protective garment formed of a composite fabric of inner and outer connected layers of mesh fabric, and wherein the inner layer is a coarse mesh fabric and is considerably thicker than the outer mesh layer, and wherein the yarns forming the inner layer are many times larger than the yarns forming the outer fabric layer so as to provide a desired effective spaced relation to prevent the stingers of insects from penetrating through the outer fabric and engaging the skin of the wearer.